I have spawned, or respawned, something:

I've just been informed that I now have a second
blogchild.
Cigar, anybody?

posted by Eric at 8:59 PM

Friday, September 13, 2002

When there's nothing left to say, self-parody is the way:

I'm just, barely, old enough to remember the anti-war Leftists of
the 1960s and 1970s. I disagreed with them over Vietnam then, and
I disagree with the anti-war Left's agitation against a war on Iraq
today. But as I read what comes out of minds of people like Robert
Fisk and Noam Chomsky and Susan Sontag these days, I wonder if I'm
getting old and allowing a golden haze to cloud my recollection of
past decades. Because I find myself feeling almost nostalgic for
the anti-Vietnam-war Left.

Yes, yes, I still think "Hanoi Jane" and her crowd were basically
wrong. Wrong about the consequences of a North Vietnamese victory
(Communists turn out to be murderously repressive — what a shock!);
wrong about the motives and interests of the U.S.; wrong about almost
everything except the level of incompetence, buffoonery, and myopia
afflicting the generals and politicians running that war.

But there was one important difference. The anti-Vietnam-war Left
may have been deluded and prone to masturbating in front of Che
Guevara posters...but if you sifted through enough of their ranting
you could detect the outlines of a principled case, or several
principled cases. There was one argument on which they persuaded me;
though I was not of draftable age, I found I agreed with them that the
military draft was an intolerable form of slavery years before I
encountered Robert Heinlein's pithy objurgation that "A nation that
cannot find enough volunteers to defend itself will not survive
— and does not deserve to."

But try as I might, I can't detect a principled case anywhere in today's
anti-war Left. Which is all the more curious since I think they
could be making one. Several, in fact: starting with the argument
that we should abandon the path of war not even because of what it does
to our enemies but because of what it does to ourselves. At every
level from the personal to the political, warfare is a brutalizing
experience that erodes our freedoms and empowers the nastiest elements
of human psyches and societies.

There are principled responses to that case, but that particular
argument is not my point. My point is that today's anti-war
rhetoric, as exemplified by reports on a planned September 11
"Teach-In and Panel regarding Oppression" at UCLA, never seems
to even confront the question of whether war against Afghanistan and Iraq
is justified by the Islamist threat. Instead, the topic is "U.S. Law
and Policy Against Immigrants of Color", as if there is any kind of
equivalence between the U.S.'s border policies and the catastrophic
mass murder of 2,500 people.

There is a curious kind of evasiveness at work here. We can see it
at work in the arid deconstructionism of Susan Sontag's NYT op-ed, Real
Battles and Empty Metaphors. Even the title announces that she's
going to lucubrate about the relationship between language and
reality, not confront reality itself. A similar denial is evident
it the rhetoric of Noam Chomsky; prodded for commentary on the war,
he recites a litany of past American wrongdoing as if that somehow
banishes the question of how soon Saddam Hussein will have nuclear
weapons and what he will do with them when he gets them.

Maybe I'm getting senile, but it seems to me that the Left of my
teens was in better contact with reality than today's crew. There
really was a military-industrial complex and the desire for war
profits probably did drive some of the political support for the
Vietnam war. The military-industrial complex is still with us today,
but the Left seems to have forgotten even the little it once knew
about political economics and isn't even bothering to raise that
issue. Perhaps this amnesia is a post-traumatic effect of watching
Marx take a header into the dustbin of history; we've come to strange
days indeed when I have to conclude that my libertarian self could
easily write a better Marxist critique of Dubya's war propaganda than
anyone on the Left has yet issued in public.

Instead, what we're seeing is a rhetoric that is half a retreat
into language-chopping and half an expression of contempt for the
U.S. — contempt so out of balance that it's doomed to be tuned out by
anyone less far to the left than the unlamented former Congresswoman
Cynthia McKinney.

When did the Left descend into such empty self-parody? And why?

Watching "real existing socialism" self-destruct must have been
part of it. I speculated on the psychological effects of that
political collapse in a previous essay Socialists
to the Stars, about Scottish SF writers Ken McLeod and Iain Banks.
But something weirder and more diffuse happened to the Left on
this side of the pond, and I'm not sure what it was.

Some days I wonder if Greg Egan, the reclusive West Australian
author who has produced some of the best hard SF of the last decade,
may not have called it right in the following passage from his novel
"Teranesia":

"Feminism was working, and the civil rights movement was working, and
all the other social justice movements were getting more and more
support. So, in the 1980s, the CIA [...] hired some really clever
linguists to invent a secret weapon; an incredibly complicated way of
talking about politics that didn't actually make any sense, but which
spread through all the universities in the world, because it sounded
so impressive. And at first, the people who talked like this just
hitched their wagon to the social justice movements, and everyone else
let them come along for the ride, because they seemed harmless. But
then they climbed on board the peace train and threw out the driver."

"So instead of going to the people in power and saying, `How about
upholding the universal principles you claim to believe in?' the
people in the social justice movements ended up saying things like `My
truth narrative is in conflict with your truth marrative!'. And the
people in power replied `Woe is me! You've thrown me into the briar
patch!' And everyone else said `Who are these idiots? Why should we
trust them when they can't even speak properly?' And the CIA was
happy. And the people in power were happy. And the secret weapon
lived on in the universities for years and years, because everyone
who'd played a part in the conspiracy was too embarrassed to admit
what they'd done,"

Egan's account is implausible only because it seems unlikely that
the CIA is quite that subtle. But he's right in pointing out that the
rise of the language of postmodernism — the sterile, involuted,
pseudo-profundity famously skewered by the Sokal Hoax
— seems to be an important correlate of the decline of the
American Left.

Self-parody is where you end up when you have nothing left to say.
And when all you can talk about is `discourse' that's a damn short road.

posted by Eric at 10:50 AM

Tuesday, September 10, 2002

One year later...

One year ago today, the World Trade Center fell in flames. And
that very day, just a few hours after the event, I wrote the following:

Some friends have asked me to step outside my normal role as a
technology evangelist today, to point out in public that a
political panic reaction to the 9/11 terrorist attack could do a
great deal more damage than the attack itself.

Today will not have been a victory for terrorism unless we make
it one. If we reward in any way the Palestinians who are now
celebrating this hideous crime in the streets of the West Bank,
that will have been a victory for terrorism. If we accept
"anti-terrorism" measures that do further damage to our
Constitutional freedoms, that will have been a victory for
terrorism. But if we learn the right lessons, if we make policies
that preserve freedom and offer terrorists no result but a rapid
and futile death, that will have been a victory for the rest of
us.

We have learned today that airport security is not the answer.
At least four separate terror teams were able to sail right past
all the elaborate obstacles -- the demand for IDs, the metal
detectors, the video cameras, the X-ray machines, the gunpowder
sniffers, the gate agents and security people trained to spot
terrorists by profile. There have been no reports that any other
terror units were successfully prevented from achieving their
objectives by these measures. In fact, the early evidence is that
all these police-state-like impositions on freedom were exactly
useless -- and in the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center
lies the proof of their failure.

We have learned today that increased surveillance is not the
answer. The FBI's "Carnivore" tap on the U.S.'s Internet service
providers didn't spot or prevent this disaster; nor did the NSA's
illegal Echelon wiretaps on international telecommunications. Video
monitoring of public areas could have accomplished exactly nothing
against terrorists taking even elementary concealment measures. If
we could somehow extend airport-level security to the entire U.S.,
it would be just as useless against any determined and even
marginally competent enemy.

We have learned today that trying to keep civilian weapons out
of airplanes and other areas vulnerable to terrorist attack is not
the answer either -- indeed, it is arguable that the lawmakers who
disarmed all the non-terrorists on those four airplanes, leaving
them no chance to stop the hijackers, bear part of the moral
responsibility for this catastrophe.

I expect that in the next few months, far too many politicians
and pundits will press for draconian "anti-terrorist" laws and
regulations. Those who do so will be, whether intentionally or not,
cooperating with the terrorists in their attempt to destroy our way
of life -- and we should all remember that fact come election
time.

As an Internet technologist, I have learned that distributed
problems require distributed solutions -- that centralization of
power, the first resort of politicians who feed on crisis, is
actually worse than useless, because centralizers regard the more
effective coping strategies as threats and act to thwart them.

Perhaps it is too much to hope that we will respond to this
shattering tragedy as well as the Israelis, who have a long history
of preventing similar atrocities by encouraging their civilians to
carry concealed weapons and to shoot back at criminals and
terrorists. But it is in that policy of a distributed response to a
distributed threat, with every single citizen taking personal
responsibility for the defense of life and freedom, that our best
hope for preventing recurrences of today's mass murders almost
certainly lies.

If we learn that lesson, perhaps today's deaths will not have
been in vain.

As I reread the above, it does not seem to me that we have
yet learned our lesson. We have taken steps towards arming pilots,
but not passengers. Tiger-team probes of airport security have
shown that the rate at which weapons can be smuggled through remains
30% -- unchanged since before 9/11. A year later, therefore,
the frisk searches of little old ladies and the no-sharp-edges
prohibitions have bought us no security at all.

The scorecard is not entirely bleak. Al-Qaeda has not been able
to mount another successful mass murder. Post-9/11 legal changes
through the Patriot Act and related legislation have been troubling,
but not disastrous. And the war against the Taliban was a rather
less complicated success than one might have expected -- civilian
casualties minimal, no uprising of the mythical "Arab Street", and
Al-Qaeda's infrastructure smashed. Osama bin-Laden is probably dead.

Still, the war is far from over. Islamic terrorism has not been
repudiated by the ulema, the college of elders who prescribe the
interpretation of the Koran and the Hadith. The call to violent jihad
wired into the foundations of Islam has not yet been broken or tamed
into a form civilization can coexist with. Accomplishing that is the
true challenge that faces us, one greater and more subtle than merely
military victory.